Where You End and I Begin

Abstract

Kevin L. Ferguson’s Where You End and I Begin is an experimental video which interrogates the edges of the moving image and troubles the act of seeing by juxtaposing sci-fi tropes of the heads-up display, and visual overlays in “part i: where i end”, with algorithmic abstractions of intimate human gestures in “part ii: and you begin”, using scientific image-analysis software, ImageJ. Innovative both in terms of form (aesthetic and technical) and content, the video explores outlines, liminal spaces and the delineation between people, places and things. There is a productive synthesis between the screenwork and its supporting research statement, not withstanding the invited criteria to judge the submission on “the extent to which the work demonstrates and activates new knowledge in the viewer’s mind without recourse to descriptive explanation”. Both video and statement, together with the peer review, work in dialogue to provide new insights, offering a poetic exploration of how the affordances of computer-generated imagery, artificial intelligence and increasingly complex algorithms challenge our understanding of both narrative filmmaking and what it means to be human.

Keywords

• experimental video
• sci-fi
• liminal spaces